


Fate or Whatever

by TheFlashFic



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-11
Updated: 2015-05-11
Packaged: 2018-03-30 00:10:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3915829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFlashFic/pseuds/TheFlashFic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An unexpected reunion with an old friend turns Cisco's lousy day a little bit better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fate or Whatever

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this because after the last few episodes I think Cisco deserves at least a few moments of happiness. I'm taking his words to Dante in 1x16 about Melinda Torres being the love of his life totally seriously. 
> 
> And that's it.

The dive bar wasn’t the kind of place Cisco normally went when he needed a drink, but given the last few days there was a good chance that someone he knew and worked with would be hanging around their regular spots drowning their own problems. He was a social creature normally, but it was wearing on him lately and he needed a little time inside his own head.

So. Dive bar. It was across from his apartment, a bare brick wall with a neon beer sign in the window as the only thing that really told anyone what it was. Wasn’t the nicest-looking place from the sidewalk, but hey. Alcohol. Short walk home.

It was basically the most he could ask for.

When he opened the door and moved in, zipping his hoodie up over his t-shirt in case sci-fi references got people beat up in places like this, there was near-silence inside. A woman behind the bar, a couple of guys playing darts in the back. The whole place was dingy brown and badly lit and empty of life. One long, narrow hallway where he could see everything and everyone no matter where he sat.

Perfect.

He moved to the bar, shaking out his shoulders stiffly. He was starting to ache at the ends of days lately. Too stiff, Caitlin told him when he mentioned it that very morning. He was carrying himself way too stiffly, which wasn’t normally a thing with him so his body was protesting it.

Better stiff than dead, he’d answered with a shrug and a smile. Then he was sent into a sewer to hunt giant telepathic gorillas. Hadn’t done much relaxing since then.

Honestly he didn’t have time to relax now. Eddie was missing, Joe was laid up back at the lab, hurt, and Wells... _Thawne_ was still on the loose.

On the loose, and he knew where Cisco lived. He knew every last thing about Cisco, and in at least one timeline that had ended with Cisco dying.

Cisco probably should have gone right home to barricade himself in and wait for sunrise like some villager in a vampire movie. But whatever. Just an hour and a few drinks somewhere where nobody knew his name, that was all he wanted out of the night.

“Cisco Ramon?”

The voice, the name, was enough to derail his thoughts, and Cisco felt himself tensing, his hands fisting at his sides, his eyes sharp going around the bar. What now? God, did he never get a break?

But before he even locked eyes with the bartender she laughed, and it was loud and cheerful and somehow familiar. “Padre! Come to give my humble place your blessings?”

His mouth dropped open when he looked at the woman for more than a moment. “Melinda Torres?”

She smiled, and it was shocking and bright after the long, awful day week month he’d just had. “I was just talking to Dante the other day. Did he tell you I was here?”

“He...no, I just...I live across the street in the apartments. I just kind of wandered in.”

“Most people do. Well, I say _most_ …” She gestured around the empty bar with an easy, full-lipped smile.

God, she was gorgeous. She’d always been gorgeous. Tall and stunning and thickly-curved, and the years hadn’t changed her all that much. Makeup flawless as ever, eyes so rich dark they were almost black, skin a couple of shades darker than his. Thick curly hair pulled back from her face.

He looked at her and was back in high school, with all the good and bad that came with it.

She waved a rag as he stared at her. “Get over here, sit! I hear you never became a man of God. Your brother is a bastard, you know.”

“Oh, I know.” He started to sit at the very end of the bar, but hesitated and moved around so that he could see the door from where he sat. Having his back to doors made him nervous. A lot of things made him nervous lately.

“Want a drink? You look like you could use one. Christ, look at your _hair_. _Look_ at you. Adorable as ever.”

He made a face, trying to ignore the heat rising to his cheeks. “ _Basta_.”

She laughed and grabbed a small glass, setting it on the bar in front of him. “You’re trying to get me to speak Spanish so you can laugh at my accent. Don’t think I don’t remember.”

Her grasp of Spanish thanks to her parents was limited, enough that she used to get teased for it by the kids in the neighborhood. It had been English-only in her house.

He echoed the laugh more quietly. “Old reflex, sorry. Anyway, forget me, look at you. Still spending hours in front of a mirror, I see.”

“I look good, though.” She fluttered long eyelashes and pursed her lips, posing.

“Not gonna argue that.” He studied her, the slight ways her face was different, the way her thick hair was fighting to escape whatever complicated style she had it tied back in. “You look amazing.”

“And don’t you forget it. Here, looks like you could use this.” She poured him a shot of something from a brown bottle and slid it over, and leaned her hands on the edge of the bar to look at him. “How’ve you been, Quito?”

He grinned, and it felt sincere. She used to call him Quito because he’d been so slight and small even Cisquito didn’t seem to fit.

Melinda Torres. Jesus. He took the glass she passed him and sniffed it uncertainly. “I’m usually more of a beer guy.”

“I won’t laugh if you make a face.” She grinned. “And nobody passes up free liquor. Especially not someone who looks the way you looked when you walked in.”

He lifted the glass, toasting that sentiment with a wry smile, and swallowed the drink. Whiskey, god, horrible, it burned down his throat and made his head shake. “Blech.”

“I know. Give it a second.”

He set the glass down, and the heat in his throat sank down into his chest and spread out into a more comfortable warmth.

Melinda studied him, her eyes sparkling dark and deep like they always had. “God, Cisco Ramon. You know, I thought about…” Her gaze slipped away for a moment. “He gave me your number. Dante. When he called.”

“Oh yeah?”

She smiled, less bright and more...god, almost shy. “He was rambling on about regret and karma, and, like, frostbite and guns. I’m pretty sure he was on some heavy medication. But yeah. He said I should call you.”

Cisco and Dante had been trying it, the brother thing, the last few weeks. It was awkward and slow and involved a lot of arguing, but suddenly Cisco felt a little more generous towards his stupid brother.

Still. “You didn’t call, though.”

She ducked her eyes, that shyness still in her smile. “No. I mean. I was going to. I was just...waiting... “ She sighed and met his eyes again. “He said you were like this amazing scientist working for a fancy lab and saving people. Literally, saving people's lives. It was kind of intimidating, considering…” She gestured around the dingy bar. “I guess I was waiting to magically become something more impressive than a bartender in a dead spot.”

Cisco’s eyebrows rose at the idea that somehow he had intimidated a woman like her. Melinda Torres, always lively and confident and quick to shrug off the girls at school who never liked her or the boys who gawked and whispered and spread rumors.

The idea made him flush. “You could call. I mean. That would be good.”

She lit up in a smile. “Well. I still have the number, so. You just invited yourself into a world of aimless texting and pointless late-night conversations, pal.”

“Hey, I am totally good at both those things. Besides, I’ll meet that and top it with TV show marathons and dragging you front row for whatever comic book movies are opening next.”

“Oh, man, like junior year of high school all over again.” From the size of her smile she didn’t seem to mind the idea.

One of the guys from the dartboard in the back came up to the far side of the bar with empty glasses in hand, and Melinda stepped back. “Stay here,” she said, grabbing that same brown bottle and pouring him another shot. “Okay? Promise?”

Cisco warmed inside before he even touched the glass. “Not going anywhere.”

“Good.”

 

* * *

 

“Okay, hypothetical question.”

“Hit me, hot stuff.”

She’d locked the front door and turned off that beer sign in the window a few minutes ago, and they were sitting alone at a table against the wall, a bottle of whiskey between them. He’d had way less to drink than he’d intended when he first got there. He also felt ten times better than he thought he would feel.

But not entirely better, which had made him speak up suddenly.

Melinda was still working on her first shot, toying with the glass between her fingers as her focus stayed on Cisco. Like he was really interesting.

She smiled after a moment. “Well? What’s your hypothetical question?”

He cleared his throat, having to force his gaze away from her bright smile. “Let’s say you somehow found out that your being alive was...an accident.”

She leaned in, eyes sparkling with curiosity. “From what my ma likes to say when she’s ticked off at me that’s not so hypothetical.”

He laughed, but it faded. He stared at his whiskey. “Not what I mean. I mean...okay, hypothetically, someone finds out that they should have died weeks ago. That it actually happened, even, but then it...changed.” He let out a breath. “This is dumb.”

“No, hey, sounds like one of those movies you used to make me watch. Okay, so let me see if I get this: I find out I actually died--”

“Me.” Cisco spoke fast, not meaning to, but death was too close to his life lately, he couldn’t feel casual about it. And he didn’t want to associate Melinda and death, not even in random conversation. “Hypothetically, I mean, it was me.”

“Okay then, you died, but then...what?”

He grinned weakly. “Time travel fixed it?”

She laughed. “See, I know this was in at least one of those movies. Okay, you died, someone got into a DeLorean, and now boom, here you are. Adorable and alive and not a priest.”

“Never a priest, right.” He couldn’t help a smile. “But even then...I mean, the guy who did the time traveling, he didn’t even know I was dead. It wasn’t about me. It was a whole unrelated thing. Changing things so I didn’t die was a fluke. A total fluke.” He shot the rest of his whiskey and made a face unwittingly.

“So why did he do the time traveling at all?”

Cisco snorted faintly. “He doesn’t actually know. It just happened, I guess.”

She studied him, her eyes still warm and curious but starting to slide into concern. She poured him another drink. “Okay, I think I’m grasping this really specific hypothetical situation of yours. So what’s the question?”

He sighed. “Just. What do you think? I mean, do you think fate or God or whoever would be mad something like that happened? Do you think maybe someone who cheats death like that is just...biding time until it catches up again?”

“Like those Final Destination movies?”

“Yeah, like that.”

She thought about it for just a few seconds before she shook her head. “Nope.”

He waited. “Nope? Easy as that?”

“Easy as that. I mean, you said it was a fluke, but you can’t really use flukes alongside things like fate and God. And me, I happen to believe in fate. Maybe there are some little things that happen on a whim, but life and death? That’s too big for flukes. Besides...time travel? From every movie I’ve ever seen that’s always a big deal, right?”

He nodded slowly. “But.”

“Nope, no buts, you want my opinion you get it without buts.” She grinned. “So my opinion is that if you died and fate or God or whatever sent some poor guy whizzing back through time to a place where you weren’t dead, and things went on from there...well, maybe that guy didn’t have to know he was bringing you back to life, because _fate_ knew.”

Cisco studied her, her sparkling eyes full of certainty, unburdened by knowledge of metahumans and bad guys from the future. But he listened, because he hadn’t just been asking to get things off his chest: he did want her opinion.

“I mean something huge like time travel would be a big deal for the universe to fall back on, right? So if someone went back and reset the clock and brought you back, maybe it’s ‘cause the universe didn’t want you dead at all. You’re meant to be alive, so much that the whole universe changed itself to make it happen.” She smiled and leaned in, sliding her hand across the table and laying it over his, light and warm. “I’d say that hypothetically makes you the most important person alive, Quito.”

He flushed even as he shook his head. “It really didn’t have anything to do with me.”

“How do you know? Your time travel friend has no idea why it happened, right?

“Right, but there were other bad things going on that it probably--”

“Nope. No probably, no other things. You want to look at it like a fluke, that’s your right. Me, I think bad things happen all the time and time doesn’t shift itself to make them stop. People die every day and don’t get a do-over. I mean, I guess they don’t. I suppose if they did I wouldn’t know, since. Time travel. But you know what I mean.”

He did, and he nodded, but he sipped at his drink and made another face and sighed. “I just don’t think it was about me. I’m not...”

“Well, who cares what you think, you were always so down on yourself, it drove me nuts. God reset the clock for you, Quito, how can that make you anything but totally special?” She smiled then, small and crooked. “Hypothetically, I mean.”

He let out a breath. “Hypothetically,” he agreed. He wanted to smile at her words, her smile, her hand still laying over his like she forgot it was there. But he couldn’t.

“It just _feels_ like it was a mistake the universe is trying to make up for now. Things have been...so _bad_ , since.” He downed the rest of his shot and hardly felt it this time around. “And they keep getting worse. There’s so much to... to be scared of now, and I keep seeing it, what happened the first time around...and there’s no one I can even talk to about it because things are bad for everybody and my problems shouldn’t become their problems, but it’s...really hard. I feel like I’m close to...like I’m going to...but I keep on making jokes and smiling and nobody…”

Her smile was gone by then. Her hand slipped off his, but only so she could slide her fingers under his palm and lace their fingers together. She gripped his hand tightly, and her eyes were suddenly intent and serious.

“You can talk to me, Quito. You always could, about some things, remember?”

He nodded, catching himself and his rising fears, looking down at their hands to ground him again.

His mind was quick to leave the horrible present and go back a few years. Him lying on her bedroom floor with their textbooks forgotten around him, griping about his family and the kids at school while she practiced putting on her makeup in the mirror and made jokes to make him laugh.

They used to tease each other all the time, her about his studying and his age (he was two years younger than her, fifteen and seventeen when they first met, but they were in the same grade because he tested straight into junior year when he started high school) and him about her makeup and hair and her focus on her appearance.

“You care so much about impressing the _gringos blancos_ at school?” he asked her once while she was putting on lipstick and wiping it off and putting on more.

She just met his eyes through the glass, smiling her playful smile. “ _Claro que no,_ ” she answered in her stilted Spanish, and he grinned accordingly. “What do I care about them for? I’m gonna marry you, remember? So everyone else leaves us the hell alone.” She looked at her reflection with a smile. “I do this ‘cause I like it. You got that big brain so you like studying. I got a nice face, I do this.”

She did have a nice face, and body, and she got a lot of heat for it. He couldn’t remember a single time they walked back to the block from school without some creepy old guy honking or shouting something gross out the window at her. She developed young, curvacious and tall as a grown woman by the time he first met her. And she already knew to keep her distance from most people because of it.

They were totally different, but they understood each other in some basic way back then. They talked all the time, about things he never talked to anybody else about. Getting married someday, because other people were stupid and mean and annoying, had been his idea.

He’d loved her so much. Fifteen year old love, maybe, but it felt huge back then.

After Dante started hitting on her and she distanced herself from Cisco little by little - which he hadn’t understood until a few weeks ago, when Dante confessed his lie - he started taking AP classes and going to CCU for advanced studies instead of walking home with her, and that had been that. He left for school and came home as rarely as possible and when her and Dante broke up Cisco stopped hearing her name at all.

Cisco looked across at her now - older, like he was, but not that much different. Her face was a little less round, her hair was a different style, her face done up perfect as a movie star, but her eyes were exactly the same as she looked back at him in concern.

He let out a faint laugh, gripping her hand. “I can’t believe you thought I was gonna be a priest.”

She pursed her lips, but shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about all that, since I talked to Dante. You remember what you used to tell me about your plans for the future?”

He thought about it.

“Nothing. You didn’t want to talk about it. You used to say people never understood when you told them, your own family even, and sometimes they treated you weird over it, and you didn’t want me to treat you weird. Before Dante I just thought it was some kinda super genius stuff I wouldn’t have understood. But the way he put it, like you had this whole religious side you didn’t like to talk about because kids were mean about it but it meant so much to you...he made it make sense. And I felt bad, ‘cause I was never religious so I might’ve laughed too. And man, my mom. Soon as she heard what he was saying, that was it. I wasn’t supposed to hang out with you anymore, not at school or at home or anywhere. No way was her slut daughter gonna get in the way of a future man of God.”

If those men in cars driving past had been bad about Melinda, her mom had been a thousand times worse. Despite wanting her kids to speak English and fit in there was nothing really modern about her. She was a rabid Catholic, and from the minute her daughter developed curves so young she treated it like a sign of some kind of unerasable sin against her soul.

“I always hated your mom,” he said with real feeling. **  
**

“I know.” Melinda smiled after a moment, letting it go as easily as she always seemed to. Only now and then did she used to let Cisco see how badly it got to her. “I’m sorry, though. Ever since Dante told me the truth I’ve been beating myself up for not just talking to you about it back then.”

“Me too,” Cisco admitted. “He was a good liar back then, though.”

“Yeah. Bastard.” She laughed faintly. “We both got lousy families, I guess.”

He looked down at her hand, still gripping his, and he smiled. That had been one more reason they were gonna run off and get married, to get out of both their homes. Her away from her shrill, resentful mother and leering father, and him away from a house full of love and pride and enthusiasm that was never, ever for him. 

It was easy to remember that now. He’d blocked it out for a lot of years, until she had become just a distant face in his memory, some girl he used to have a crush on. A silly regret from when he was a kid. But man, for a whole year back in high school he’d wrapped his whole future up in her, and it had been amazing.

She spoke suddenly, and when he looked up at her her gaze was also on their hands.

“I always knew you were something special, Quito. Even when I thought you were gonna take that big brain to a church, that was gonna be the luckiest church ever. Those were gonna be some extra-saved souls. So...whatever’s going on with you, this hypothetical situation you’re talking about...it doesn’t even surprise me. Tell me straight up that God Himself shook His head after a few minutes of watching a world without you in it and said ‘nope’ and reversed everything to bring you back...that makes sense to me.”

He blinked, and his vision blurred and went hot. She didn’t know, he told himself, about Barry and the metas and just how many incredible people were around these days that made a guy like Cisco less than insignificant in the bigger picture. She didn’t understand, that was all.

But he drew in a breath and it felt unsteady. “You really believe that?”

“ _Por supuesto, mi cielito_.” She smiled crookedly.

He laughed the way she obviously wanted, because he always did when she spoke Spanish, though her accent was better than it used to be and her words made him want to force Barry to somehow take him back through time to high school to live his next nine years over again differently.

She met his eyes, sure and confident in her answer, and suddenly he actually wondered.

Was it possible? Barry didn’t know why or how he moved through time. He had gone just as fast since then with no time effects, and though there was some stuff about Iris and a tidal wave and things, there was no one thing he could point to with any certainty as being the reason why he went back.

Maybe it really had been a mistake. Maybe Cisco was never supposed to die. Maybe the accident was what happened in his nightmares, not what was happening now. Maybe things were just lousy now because they were lousy, and he wasn’t living on borrowed time, he was just...living.

“Huh.” He rubbed at his face, wiping away a couple of damp tracks from his cheeks that he hadn’t noticed until then.

She just grinned like she didn’t notice or didn’t feel the need to point them out. “That settles is. Obviously you need more of me in your life, so you better expect to hear from me.”

He laughed unsteadily. “You kidding? Now I know you work across the street from my place, you’re never getting rid of me.”

“Good.” Her fingers drifted over his hand again. “I miss it, the way I used to adore you back then. I’m due for some more of that.”

“I miss a lot of things from back then.” He grinned.

But, in what was turning into a theme with him lately, the happiness only lasted a few moments. “It might be dangerous. I mean, the person who killed me the first time, he’s still out there.”

“Not even pretending this is hypothetical anymore, huh?”

“Oh. I mean.” Cisco felt his face go red. He didn’t have enough practice these days talking to non-STAR people. “Well. It didn’t happen exactly like...um, what I said. I mean it wasn’t...well, it _was_ , but it wasn’t really...”

Her eyebrows rose higher the more he stammered. She held up a hand suddenly. “There’s this website I go to a lot, it’s mostly about this one guy but there’s stories about other people on it, local people, all from this city, who can do all these really strange, miraculous things. But most of those people are pretty bad, seems like. At first I thought it was some kind of fiction thing, but you read the newspapers these days and it’s not much different from that website.”

He swallowed, torn between surprise and dread over the fact that Melinda already had some clues about his stupid complicated life these days.

She studied him, and he was sure his surprise was plain. “So. I mean. You said time-travel and it sounded like a movie, but I knew it maybe wasn’t. And you work for that lab, Dante told me. The one on the website, that blew up or something and was on the news for a while.”

Cisco let out a breath, and nodded. So much for secrecy. Not that he was good at it to begin with, and...whatever, he already saw what keeping secrets from Iris did to Barry.

“All the weird stuff these days, it came from us. The lab. Not on purpose or anything, but...we know about it. We’re involved. I’m involved. And it gets really dangerous.”

She sat back, her hand sliding off his and grabbing her drink. She swallowed the whiskey and set the glass down. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay, it’s dangerous. Fine. I’m still texting you at three in the morning when I can’t sleep tonight.” There was determination in the lift of her chin and the set of her mouth. “You’re not getting rid of me that easy, Quito.”

He knew that look. She had always been stubborn, though she didn’t turn it on him very often.

Seeing it now made him smile. He supposed it might have been nobler to use the threat of danger to justify walking away. ‘Nice to see you again, have a great life,’ or whatever. But Cisco didn’t want to walk away. Having something of his own to lose meant having something of his own, and he wanted to know, just once, what that was like.

He never could have hoped that the thing he had to lose would be her, but there was no way he was going to walk away from the opportunity now that she was there. He wasn’t built for the heroic self-sacrifices. He wasn’t the hero at all, he was just a guy.

A guy that fate turned back time for, so he could be sitting there with her.

So he grinned and grabbed the bottle and poured them both another shot. “Sounds good to me.”

 


End file.
